Experts to discuss raising children of character

As a career educator, Savannah Country Day School headmaster Tom Bonnell sometimes sees the less pleasant sides of child development.

He's dealt with parents who want to manage every aspect of their children's lives in hopes of insulating them from failure.

He's encountered teenage drinking and drug use.

And last school year, he expelled five students in connection with a hazing incident.

Community members will have the opportunity to explore the roots of this type of behavior as well as the steps parents and schools can take to raise moral children during a seminar at Country Day Saturday.

"Raising Children of Character in an Age of Indulgence" is the latest installment in the school's "Creative Minds" lecture series, which is sponsored in part by the Savannah Morning News.

Bonnell sees the seminar, which features three child development experts as well as a keynote address from Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson, as an "optimistic presentation" that will offer a "fairly cohesive picture of what parents and schools need to do."

"As a head of a school, I care very much that our students graduate and are well-prepared academically, that they know how to think, how to write, that they're fluent in the language of mathematics," Bonnell said. "But I think where most of us are, that's not enough."

William Damon, who'll give the first presentation Saturday, also sees the seminar as an opportunity to focus on a positive approach to child development.

An education professor at Stanford and the director of the university's Center on Adolescence, Damon published "Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools" in 1995.

He opens that book with a dystopic "fable of our near future" in which gun-toting youth gangs are commonplace and a student's suicide is quickly overshadowed by a knifing epidemic.

The situation has improved since the mid-90s, Damon said. He points to the drop in a lot of crime statistics, teenage pregnancy and some drug use as evidence that a "cultural change" is taking place and adults are asserting authority in more positive ways.

"But I think there are a lot of things, partly that I didn't even get to in that book, and still a lot of young people, if they're not in the kind of trouble I was writing about (then), they're at least drifting."

He cited national surveys indicating that about 20 percent of children truly have a sense of purpose, 60 percent have some glimmer of the track they want to pursue and another 20 percent are cynical, full of apathy and "absolutely drifting."

Damon said the challenges cut across class lines and can be overcome when children are given some sense of responsibility and spend time in a climate where adults stress achievement, service and the idea that there's some larger purpose to life.

Damon's talk Saturday will focus on the ways adults can emphasize a child's assets.

"It's really the idea of saying kids are very capable and they do best when you challenge them to do a lot," he said. "What you really want to do is to find them something to go for."

Saturday's other speakers include James Garbarino, a co-director of the Family Life Development Center and professor of human development at Cornell University, and Dan Kindlon, a Harvard professor and clinical and research psychologist.

Garbarino will discuss the ways life is more risky now than it was 40 years ago and how a socially toxic environment can poison the development of children.

Kindlon will discuss his research on the ways parents overindulge their children, making them unprepared for the future.